Yesterday, I'm sure you caught the referances to The Day of the Dead. Since my Church has planned a Day of the Dead service for November 2, I decided that this week, that is what the kids and I would work on. So not only would they learn about a great holiday, they would also learn about a county rich in cultural traditions, unlike our massive commercial based holidays here. While lots of things are marketed for Day of the Dead, the Mexican culture understands it's roots and they still observe it in it's full glory.
So, to kick off the week, we read Day of the Dead by Tony Johnston. This is a great little preschool level book. Each page hase beautiful pictures in rich vibrant colors. It tells the story about a families preparations about this important holiday. The sentences are short, with only one or two per page. I like how some Spanish words are interwoven into it such as "Tias" for Aunt or "esperense" for wait. It talks about the special food, preparations and altar (ofrenda) that lead up to the joyful ocassion of remembering the dead. My children really liked this book, and we read it a couple of times. Google has a good preview of it here.
I'm going to run this similar to the Five in a Row curriculum. Every day we're going to read the book again and do a new activity. So, today, we looked for Mexico on a big world map. Then we looked for it on Google Earth. We also messed around in Zoom School Mexico at Enchanted Learning. I had originally planned on printing out a picture of the flag for them to color, but since the printer is still on vacation, we just looked at pictures instead. ABC Teach has a good printout here (pdf).
They wanted to know a little more about the holiday so we also looked up images on Google and then we watched a couple of vids on Youtube. Interesting enough, they already knew a little bit about Day of the Dead when I was reading them the book. They told me about the sugar skulls and the dances at the cemetary. I wasn't sure how they knew this until I remembered The Halloween Tree! This is an awesome movie (it was always my favorite Halloween movie growing up and I watched it every year) based on a book The Halloween Tree by Ray Bradbury.
The book and movie, while both really good are also vastly different but I recommend both. The movie has only five of the original eight children and it adds a girl. The movie also drops several of the cultures in the book and handles only medeival England (witches and Stonehenge), Paris (Notre Dame & gargoyles), Ancient Egypt (mummies and the pyramids) and Mexico (Dio de los Muertos). Since this is one of my favorite movies, of course I own it so of course the kids have watched it. I never reall thought about this movie/book as a teaching tool before but I guess it is since it opens up great conversation and learning opportunities about geography, history and culture.
Day of the Dead Vids (The last one is a rather dark computer animation that you may wish to view before your child as it may frighten them. I didn't know this and my boys watched it and loved it.)
The Halloween Tree excerpt ~ Mexico and The Day of the Dead
More Books To Read
  
  
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Posted by Anonymous 
Oct. 28, 2008 - Clatter Bash!
Hey, thanks much for including my book Clatter Bash! on your terrif site! A new softcover version is now also available.
Saludos,
Richard Keep